When thought leaders lay out a vision of revolutionizing healthcare in the coming years, it’s usually a fusion of medicine and ground-breaking technology that calls to mind sophisticated AI robots performing non-invasive surgery with lasers to cure cancer in a matter of minutes.
Chances are that, sooner or later, that vision of the future of healthcare will be realized. But right now, in many more subtle and user-friendly ways, personalized medicine is already with us and changing the lives of ordinary people.
Far and wide across the consumer packaged goods (CPG) and retail economy, digital disruption is forcing legacy brands to radically reevaluate how they view production, distribution and consumption in the digital age. With distribution and sales models dating back 100 years or more, incumbents have been slow to adapt to the rise of the “digital native” consumer — a younger, more nuanced and tech-savvy demographic.
Unable to successfully employ the “mass-mass-mass” strategies of years past (mass production, mass distribution, mass advertising), the industry has fallen on tough times: Retailers
and supermarkets
are filing for bankruptcy at record rates. CPG legacy brands are reporting significant loses
at the hands of fast-growing startups
. Amazon and Walmart, in addition to their intensely bitter price wars
, have transitioned from clients to competitors with their own private labels
. Consumer preferences
are continuing to shift as technology evolves.
If legacy brands want to survive, they must transform and adapt.
Charles Darwin said in On the Origin of the Species that it’s not the strongest or most intelligent of the species that survives, but the one that’s most adaptable to change.
While we’re a long way off from 1859, the idea is just as relevant as it ever was. We are a species whose habitat is now ruled by technology, and it is chancing at a rapid pace.
Connectivity, data analytics, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things are rapidly changing our world and environment, and according to Moore’s Law, the pace of change will only grow. IBM said in a recent report
that 90 percent of the world’s data has been generated in the past two years. Much as we couldn’t have envisioned 2018 in the year 2000, we can’t quite know what our habitat will be like in 2025 or 2035.
Invest in the future of personalized nutrition, which resides in the future of the quantified self and future of food processing, manufacturing, and fulfillment.
Imagine a future where you could know everything about your body, including natural composition, but also real-time need state. Here’s a list of a few fast-moving trends that will enable that, all riding Moore’s law by doubling their price-performance every 9 to 18 months.
Scenario Planning is the process of anticipating possible futures by generating actionable insights through the creation a small set of scenarios for an organization’s future environment that are:
Relevant to critical business decisions
Distinct
Individually realistic and believable
Together cover the breadth of relevant uncertainties
Scenarios are visions of alternative plausible futures.
One of the most critical aspects of any successful company is to have great Mission, Vision, and Culture. There are many good articles about this, like [Execution Eats Strategy], [Culture Trumps Strategy], but today’s let’s talk about having a great vision.
A vision statement is a declaration of an organization’s objectives, ideally based on economic foresight, intended to guide its internal decision-making.
An MTP stands for a massive transformative purpose. If you ever read the book Built To Last by Jim Collins and Jerry Poras, it’s like a BHAG with purpose. It’s the higher, aspirational purpose of the organization.
The following is the first part of a multi-part series covering organizations of the future, covering vision, strategy, organization design, operational model, and culture.
The latest digital buzz is Digital Transformation, defined as the profound and accelerating transformation of business activities, processes, competencies and models to fully leverage the changes and opportunities of digital technologies and their impact across society in a strategic and prioritized way.
Along the lines of framing the future, I submitted a panel for SXSW on Simplifying Innovation
- would really appreciate your vote and feedback.
With today’s pace of technology innovation, increased expectation of user experience, and company leadership mandate to innovate - how do you answer a simple question: what?
With today’s pace of change and innovation, new technologies, services, startups, and constant chaos - one of the most common asks is to how do we make sense of it all? What will stand out? What should we invest on? Here’s a short video I presented at the Digiday Agency Innovation Camp on how to reframe the problem, simplify the statement, and create a framework to explain the future.
Prior to mentoring at the Agency Innovation Camp, Digiday interviewed
me asking me about hiring talent, emerging technology, and futurism. Was a fun interview and I recommend it for every young talent at the agency word - hope you enjoy.
**MailChimp **Nothing beats the measurement and attribution capabilities for multiple lists for the price. Your startup more than likely doesn’t overkill nurturing capabilities that expensive solutions have. Use third-party integrations with SalesForce to associate email campaigns with lifecycle and behavior groups of your users/customers. **Rapportive **Know everything about a potential partner from a pane in Gmail. Instant connectivity to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Crunchbase with contacts is awesome for quick update on partners, customers and prospects.
Often innovation finds a series of technologies, repurposes them, mashes them up, and creates an incredible new experience; other times, it ruins them.
Over the past couple of years, a new type of speaker has been emerging: a portable vibration speaker
that can turn any surface into speakers, like the TruPulse
, EpiShock
, or many others.
Apparently Sky Go came up with a great idea: to use sound as a medium by enabling windows at subways or trains. They called it, the Talking Window Ads
. The idea is actually really good, but if you watch the video below, you’d find that the implementation - not so much. You tell me: who would like to be unexpectedly interrupted, likely when you’re trying to sleep, with a voice trying to sell you Sky Go?
Official GoDaddy.com Commercial just went live, featuring Smart meets Sexy with Bar Refaeli kissing some nerd dude. The video will go viral, but it’s such as lame advert … GoDaddy is giving their ad agency way too much power …
Google Analytics has put together a series of videos demonstrating what poor Web design can do to an online commerce site - situations we’d never put up in real life.
Produced by Google’s in-house video agency in the UK, all the spots have the absurdity of a Monty Python skit. It seems weird for Google to be dissing online search and e-commerce, but here it serves the greater goal of telling people to learn more about their customers via Analytics. And in this case, it’s funny ‘cause it’s true.
Lux Research has put together a group of cutting-edge emerging technology companies to watch in 2013, mostly energy tech.
1).Beta Renewables
: A $350 million joint venture between Gruppo Mossi & Ghisolfi and TPG, Italian company Beta Renewables is scaling up a commercial cellulosic ethanol factory, which it began operating in the fourth quarter of 2012 in Italy. The plant is supposed to eventually make 20 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol per year, starting from an initial volume of 40,000 tons. Beta Renewables uses enzymes to break down non-food biomass and then uses a fermentation process to turn it into biofuels.
The popularity of 3D printing has exploded, but even as prices for the devices have fallen, not everyone is prepared or able to shell out the cash necessary start experimenting. But what if there was a 3D vending machine that made experimenting quick and easy, without the printer investment? Well, now there is.
There is a growing startup community and ecosystem in South Florida. Developers, entrepreneurs, investors, incubators are all present, trying to get organized and kickstart the local innovation culture. There’s also the added benefit of the tropical lifestyle and international culture that defines South Florida. Below are some resources to get you started and get you connected to the tech vibe and professional networks in the tropics.
Lately I’ve been following heavily the start-up community, getting involved in the Miami startup movement
, advising and mentoring - but ultimately, it’s a lean/mean innovation machine, indicator of future experiences, and there are great opportunities to marry the start-up and agency world :: innovation + story telling + brands.
Here’s a shortlist of trends to follow in 2013.
1- Cloud infrastructure SaaS & Security
This trend is not new, but I think it is cyclical, and the first wave has faded out in 2011. Cloud services is the fastest growing web hosting product at the moment, cloud services is said to reach a market value of $48bn, some say 10% of all IT spendings will be made in cloud services; the trend is clearly going up and not planning on decelerating in the next 5-10 years.
Why a trend in 2013?, Github still growing, Google Cloud introduced earlier this year to compete with Amazon Web Services, Amazon lowering prices, introducing big-data services, more companies have a foot in the cloud and services are getting cheaper and easier to scale than dedicated or VPS hosting. And with a new generation of companies in this sector, 2013 will make it hot again.
Cloud is becoming ubiquitous, now having storage, computing, backups, big data analysis and processing, data collection and aggregation, communications - you name it. It’s making it easier and easier for startups and connect the dots, wire core services together, and form a new innovative service. Cloud is making it easier than ever to fulfill the tech stack of any startup, allowing [the few who can] to focus on the business.
Today’s ad of the day features two greats from the sports world: Lakers player Kobe Bryant and Barcelona soccer star Lionel Messi.
The Turkish Airline spot shows Bryant and Messi trying their hardest to win the attention of a little boy looking for an autograph.
For those who know me, I’ve been a Barça fan for over 20 years, so Messi should win hands down …
AWS provides you with a number of data storage options. I’ve been using S3 with Arq
for persona backups, and with AWS CLI tools all my servers. I have a rotation policy to keep 7 days, then a weekly backup for 4 weeks, and a monthly backup for 3 months … all working perfectly, but in reality I rarely use any of these old backups … so why not archiving them? It’s 10x cheaper to do so!
STANDARD - 99.999999999% durability. S3’s default storage option, starting at $0.125 per GB
RRS - 99.99% durability. S3’s Reduced Redundancy Storage option, starting at $0.093 per GB
GLACIER - 99.999999999% durability, object archived in Glacier option, starting at $0.010 per GB
Today I would like to focus on Amazon S3
and Amazon Glacier
and a new and powerful way for you to use both of them together.
Both of the services offer dependable and highly durable storage for the Internet. Amazon S3 was designed for rapid retrieval. Glacier, in contrast, trades off retrieval time for cost, providing storage for as little at $0.01 per Gigabyte per month while retrieving data within three to five hours.
How would you like to have the best of both worlds? How about rapid retrieval of fresh data stored in S3, with automatic, policy-driven archiving to lower cost Glacier storage as your data ages, along with easy, API-driven or console-powered retrieval?
Sound good? Awesome, because that’s what we have! You can now use Amazon Glacier as a storage option for Amazon S3.
Gangnam Style is such an unexplainable phenomenon, but I can’t seem to get tired of finding new parodies. This one on Mitt Romney Style is just too funny.
So I’ve been working on experience innovation, emerging technologies, R&D, and a bunch of amazing fortune 500 clients.
Among the new things I will start sharing tons of new Amazon hosting tips and tricks, performance, scaling, benchmarking multiple caching solutions, big data and nosql, rapid mobile application development …
Which tech would you like me to share first?
Amazingly funny - someone at Fox 5 either has no idea about current technology and what a smartphone is capable of, or this was a joke that made it on to live television and the repercussions are now being felt. As part of their NYC coverage segment, they used some over-a-year-old futuristic iPhone 5 concepts that showed it with lasers and holographic projection capabilities.
No matter how much you try to deny it, Apple knows that 86.3% of what you do on your iPhone involves snapping food photos, filtering food photos and sharing food photos.
This leaked iPhone 5 official promo video just leaked online, showing the next iteration of the device with one big, tasty focus: food. Specifically, photos of food.
SapientNitro’s 2012 Cannes Lions presentation on Global Brands vs Global Celebrities, by my good friend Freddie Laker, who moderated a debate beween Daz McColl and Omar Epps.
** [Global Brands vs Global Celebs: Who's the Smarter Marketer?](http://www.slideshare.net/TMTYL/global-brands-vs-global-celebs-whos-the-smarter-marketer "Global Brands vs Global Celebs: Who") ** from **[Freddie Laker](http://www.slideshare.net/TMTYL)**
DC Shoes’ Ken Block Gymkhana series has been amazingly successful. With Gymkhana Three stacking 45M views, Gymkhana Two has 35M, Gymkhana Four 19M, One 12M, and now Gymkhana Five, released only days ago already has 13M views.
This one was filmed in San Francisco an has some amazing shots!
Great job by Ken Block and DC Shoes to bring this to life.
NFC Mobile Payments has been tested several times in the past, London’s Tube system won’t be getting mobile-based payment technology any time soon. Customer Experience Director Shashi Verma said that existing NFC technology wasn’t able to drop below the 500 millisecond barrier – something which Transport for London demands from its high-churn Oyster card-based turnstiles. Verma added, “The concerns are only around NFC technology and not EMV. We are keen to see any progress the industry can make in this area.
As you may recall, I switched my WordPress theme two months ago , and installed a new theme called PixelPower. If you read my previous post, I had disabled W3 Total Cache Minify and replaced with Better WordPress Minify.
So after successfully implementing the W3 Total Cache minify on another blog I decided to give mine a second chance; the problem I found was that it takes a few seconds for W3TC to write it to disk, and my Amazon CloudFront gets a 404 the first time it tries to hit it … After a second attempt it seems to be working fine.
Brilliant iPhone Infographic showing the history of the iPhone since it was released 5 years ago. Early adopters ogled its touchscreen interface and poked at little icons. Today, the smartphone and touchscreen concept is totally mainstream thanks in large part to the iPhone’s overwhelming success and iconic design. Arguably, the iPhone was the beginning of the mobile revolution.
The device revolutionized Apple itself. iPhone sales were a tiny slice of Apple pie in 2007. In 2012, it accounts for 58% of the company’s revenue (which, overall, has skyrocketed, thanks to a culture of iTunes and apps propagated by the iPhone) – check out Apple by the Numbers
.
Sales of the iPhone (and its related services and accessories) even trump the revenue of entire companies like Microsoft and Disney. It’s no wonder that Apple is consistently a front-runner for the most valuable company in the world by market cap.
I don’t always follow basketball, but when I do, I follow the Heat. Actually, those who know me know I never watch basketball, but there are certain people in Boston that cannot stand loosing, so Dave
, this is for you.
This must be the week for the new Microsoft Surface
; I explained yesterday the marvelous new design
, and today I just found this new piece of gold. While demo’ing the new Surface, the entire OS froze completely on the presenter - he was showing the new Internet Explorer, which should serve as a hint: please discontinue IE, please!
On a positive note, the presenter actually handled it pretty well - it’s not easy to keep going in these situations.
Microsoft announced this week their new Microsoft Surface for Windows 8 RT and Microsoft Surface for Windows 8 Pro. After careful analysis we now understand the main competitive differentiation against laptops, tablets, and other portable devices. Apparently Microsoft has its own Jonathan Ive - brilliant!
As globalisation and digitalisation continue to break down the barriers between cultures and geographies we’re seeing a rapid rise in global brands, but also in true global celebrities. Celebrities, for better or worse, are brands in their own right and they operate in areas that are passion points for consumers and frequently leverage immense social currency. To some celebrity marketing is a lazy option but celebrities aren’t lazy marketers.
Omar Epps, who plays Dr Eric Foreman on the global TV hit House, joins SapientNitro to explore the way celebrities are leveraging cutting-edge marketing techniques and leading in adoption of new digital platforms such as Pinterest, Instragram, or Beeyoo. Global brands can learn from global celebrities to be more effective, but can global celebrities learn from global marketers?
Our open dialogue debate the strategies and communication tactics adopted by both global marketers and celebrities while sharing some of our experiences and insights around supporting global brands. Can ‘brand purpose’ compete with ‘celebrity brands’ or do they exist in harmony?
Who’s the smarter marketer? In asking who is winning consumer interest we will explore the differences to find new ways to reach consumers, build brands, and drive sales.
Microsoft just announced they’re launching their own branded Surface for Windows 8 RT and Surface for Windows 8 Pro tablets. I guess it’s safe to assume that the old Microsoft Surface is dead, since they reused the name and url
for the new tablet PC. It measures 9.3mm, has a 10.6", 16:9 widescreen HD Display, and comes with an integrated Kickstand and a revolutionary, 3mm thin, pressure sensitive cover that doubles as a fully functioning keyboard and trackpad. The Standard Version has a 1080p resolution, while the Pro Version comes with an amazing 4096p.
I personally still don’t see the point of the netbooks, ultrabooks, or new marketing slang of the day … Is anyone using them? isn’t a Macbook Pro / AIR and an iPad enough?
Now that’s a brilliant execution! Swiss daily newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung just went digital, and as they celebrate entering the Digital Newspaper era, they printed the entire front page in binary.
Awesome Viral Video ad by Samsung titled Seductive Motion, featuring their new motion controlled Smart TV.
Everything is going motion and voice controlled, with nice features such as face detection; which makes me think that voice detection (know who I am by my voice) should come next … If I say ‘favorites’ to trigger a list of my favorite channels, it should know to display my list, even if me, my wife, and my kids are in the room.
Pinterest is now the 3rd most popular social network site in the U.S.
, and ecommerce stores can leverage its popularity to significantly increase traffic and sales (as seen in this Pinterest Ecommerce Infographic).
To better understand how Pinterest is impacting the ecommerce industry, Shopify analyzed data from over 25,000 online stores. Interestingly, referral traffic from Pinterest to Shopify stores is equal to traffic coming from Twitter; of that traffic, shoppers are 10% more likely to make a purchase compared to those who arrive from other social sites. Of those purchases, the average order is double the average order from Facebook. Pinterest has already become a huge player in the world of ecommerce.
Check out all of our findings in the Pinterest Ecommerce Infographic below. Please click on the image to view it in full-screen.
Collection of charts summing up a perspective and Facebook IPO Analysis curating and focusing on all the buzz leading up to the big event, and the controversy proceeding it.
Shares in the social-media giant Facebook (NAS: FB) have been public for more than two weeks now. The bad news is that they’re down more than 35% since opening at $42 on May 18. The good news is that things could have been a lot worse.
If you had traded FB Stock the IPO Opening day based on Twitter sentiment signals, how would you have done? Think Twitter could be a valid indicator of Facebook Stock Price?
Probably pretty well! Claims
data collection and analysis company Datasift.
They monitored Twitter’s social data and its relation to the Facebook stock price. What they found was pretty interesting: the positive and negative posts on Twitter mirrored the fluctuations in Facebook stock price.
Awesome hack by StinkDigital
- they setup a Nike+ FuelBand
to measure the “health” of their twitter account. It’s been rigged up via an Arduino
board and motor kit to read #TweetFuel
tagged tweets, digesting each tweeters followers, along with total retweets and mentions to power the spins of the Nike+ FuelBand, ultimately measuring the health of their own Twitter Feed.
Buddy Media was acquired by SalesForce
last week for $689 million. Amazing journey and accomplishment for a small start-up, now part of one of the best companies in the world. But for Michael Lazerow the journey started much earlier. Michael has a heart condition and cheated death a few times - he opens up and share his story with the world. He made a video with a bit of his story, and bit around the acquisition, but sharing with the world the secret to life: conquer fear, and you’ll conquer the world.
Awesome ad featuring wwo of the world’s biggest athletes go head-to-head in a battle of explosive speed. On-court, Rafael Nadal’s supremacy is almost unrivaled, but against Cristiano Ronaldo and the new Mercurial Vapor VIII, things get interesting. Start serving soft balls, and slowly picking up… I want to see Ronaldo stop a 160mph serve with his chest in real life - that should hurt! :)
Samsung’s Olympic Games Ambassador David Beckham displays precise footwork with a 15-foot wall of drums, the GALAXY Note and the illustrative capabilities enabled by the S Pen.
Not sure what does it have to do with Samsung or the Galaxy Note, and I say it has nothing on the Soccer Angry Birds video
.
University of North Carolina goalies Lassi Hurskainen and Dan Jackson use their feet to play a real life version of the absurdly addictive video game, ‘Angry Birds.’
This one is not new, but I actually just discovered it. Check out their creative trick shot video below.
Like many interesting scientific discoveries, this one was an accident. Sean Murphy, an undergraduate student, was working alone in the lab on a set of faces for one of his experiments. He aligned a set of faces at the eyes and started to skim through them. After a few seconds, he noticed that some of the faces began to appear highly deformed and grotesque. He called it the “Flashed Face Distortion Effect”.
This is amazingly funny and entertaining … check it out.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin recently sat down with the Lieutenant Governor of California Gavin Newsom for an hour-long interview. Brin, as he has done in the past, wore the company’s Project Glass prototype
, and even allowed Newsom to test them out. During the interview it is revealed that the device features a touch-sensitive trackpad that allows users to scroll through content.
When asked about a potential release, Brin states that he has “some hopes to maybe get it out sometime next year,” although he did caution “that’s still a little bit of a hope.”
Of course, while Wallet is Google’s first big push into mobile payments, it is far from the first. Mobile payments have been “the future” of payments for decades now, long before the days of smartphones equipped with NFC (or Near Field Communication
). Early attempts in the 1990s from companies like DigiCash
focused not on phones, but on standalone “smart cards,” which promised better security, no transaction fees and more convenience than traditional credit cards – one day we would use them not to just pay for items at a store, but from our home computers as well. E-cash for an e-economy.
With the rapid rise of cellphones, though, came a push for mobile commerce, or “m-commerce,” an effort that really began to pick up steam in the early 2000s
when mobile payments were not just the realm of upstarts, but big players like Nokia (which would continue to push its own efforts throughout the decade). Our phones would be the one device we used for everything: they’d open doors, get us on a bus or subway, and let us pay for anything, anywhere. In many ways, that’s still the goal we’re working towards, and one that’s slowly starting to become a reality.
Very interesting - SalesForce, who’s doing all the right moves will acquire Facebook CMS company Buddy Media for $800 Million. Well, BuddyMedia has built more than that over the years - the 5 years old company started as a simple CMS to build Facebook Apps, which then integrated with the Graph API, built reusable modules, analytics, profiling, and more.
SalesForce has had a strong offering, and are getting all the right components to become the one-stop-shop for all [social] CRM needs.
Interesting infographic on future cars. The car of the future will be connected, cloud enabled, and will be part of the greater trend of Internet of Things. The Infograph talks about V2V communications [Vehicle to Vehicle], just like any other M2M [Machine to Machine]. More and more we’re seeing self-aware devices and interconnectivity, that are capable of sending core signals / data elements for a better and smarter environment. V2V communication is not sufficient, we need better communication with highways, hazards, traffic, cameras, natural disasters, parking, and more.
Asides from that, foreseeable aspects such as better infotainment systems, music and video streaming, smart sensors for better security and safety,
Interesting that for future cars there is no mention to self-driving cars, fuel efficiency, external sensors for better automation such as real-time video analytics …
It’s a pretty infographic, but very limited from a thinking perspective.
Awesome infographic on the world of tech IP. Lawsuits, patents, and tons of activity. Note that Apple doesn’t sell patents to anyone, and no one is allows to touch Apple’s IP. Apple is the most active player in the court room as well. Google very quiet, but plays well in the patent marketplace. Motorola Mobility remarkably told a monstrous number of patents to Google, which might have been cheaper to just buy them than keep paying it. And Nortel apparently has it made, where every large player pays them a nice recurring revenue.
W+K does it again - same makes of Nike Write The Future
FIFA 2010 ad, now released another football masterpiece.
While the film opens on a soccer match between France and Holland, the action is suddenly taken over by wave upon wave of soccer-mad young players who are eager to make their mark on the soccer world. The young players are the folks from “The Chance
,” Nike’s scouting mission to find 100 potential soccer champions from 50 countries.
This video is again amazing, featuring Van der Wiel, Sneijder, Lloris, Guardiola, Kevin Strootman, Van Der Vaart, Mamadou, M’vila, Ribery, C.Ronaldo, Gotze e Ozil, Hernandez (Chicharito), LeBron James, Iniesta e Pique, Neymar, Pato, Jack Wilshere, Mark van Bommel, Pastore, and Laurent Blanc.
Short note on a few changes I’ve made lately … For those who syndicate my blog, I changed the look .. got bored of that Apple-ish look and installed a much cleaner one.
I also wanted to improve the reading experience and made tons of improvements on performance and loading time:
I installed Varnish in front of Apache. I originally installed Varnish 2.1.5 a few weeks ago and the different was amazing.
The infographic below was designed by Sortable
. It shares the latest Apple profits, revenues and cash-in-hand, along with the company’s reach — 30% of smartphone users in the U.S. have an iPhone.
Along with an impressive iPad market share (62%) and an astounding number of employees (over 30,000), don’t forget one of Apple’s most valuable properties — the App Store. You’ll currently find 600,000 apps and counting in the store, and 895 new apps are added every day.
Old school flashback! Google couldn’t wait for April Fools’ Day to prank the web with its 8-bit version of Google Maps, temporarily replacing its standard version. Not as good or real as the Google Chrome Multitask Mode , but fun nonetheless.
On Friday, Google posted this YouTube video:
Accessing the 8-bit map is easy. Use Google Maps as you normally would to search for cities or landmarks, then click on the “Quest” picture icon in the right area of the screen to view the map as large colored pixels.
Google again at the edge of innovation - how come no one ever thought of this before? I just tried it out, and I think this increases my performance by 100% - should I get a raise?
The only phone in the US that supports NFC is the Google Nexus S, available with t-mobile and Sprint, and there are high hopes that the iPhone 5 will support it too.
Right now, Google Wallet only works with Citi-Mastercards and the Google Prepaid Card. Visa and Google announced a worldwide agreement to support the Visa payWave app, but it will still be up to the financial institutions and banks to add support.
Pretty funny Google+ videos showing how it has no immediate competitive advantage … initial reaction is “do we really need another social network”? in this video it shows that if you dig down, the usability is actually quite nice … but people would have to give it a chance first, and as you can see in this infographic
: they don’t.
The Google+ Song
LYRICS:
Check my email, got an invite
To a website I don't know
Looked like googlebuzz at first sight,
But my friend said that's a no.
Why did we need, another social network?
Doesn't Facebook work alright?
A new thing for me to learn
This could take all night, Look out!
What is this google +
I don’t Need google +
There’s another +1 and another +1
What is this google +
Hey, Why’s this red thing here?
Go away google +
You want me to put my friends in circles
But circles are for squares
Everday’s like Sophie’s choice
Trying to choose which friend goes where
But No Parents, or Ex-boyfriends…
Can get in without invites
And when I drunkenly post that he’s cute
I can edit it later that night - whoa
I kinda like google +
Can’t believe I’m on google +
Oh another hangout, and another hang out
I dig my google +
Hey, old high school friend
You can’t join my google +
Friends add me, without me adding them
That feature’s really nice
Randos
Uglies
my pot dealer
and all these friend’s I’ve never liked
No one knows, my circle names,
So even good friend’s get handpicked
Do you make it into my main feed
or do I add you to my circle of pricks
I’m in love with google plus
I’m judgemental on goggle +
and Another douchebag and another loser
You didn’t make my google plus
Hey, Now I’m a facist pig
Thank you google plus!
Google+ now finally open to the public “might” make me change my perception. Google+ (plus) launched early July on an invite only basis, which seems to have heavily skewed towards a geeky male US-based audience. At the moment, Google+ really has nothing to offer in the social end … yes, the way you organize friends is better (IMO) than Facebook, and … … … well, that’s it … You might have heard me claim that it will compete against iCloud in the quest to conquer your hard data (photos, videos, music, files) - but that’s another post on its own.
The first Google+ infographic was released an the numbers pretty much confirm it: 26 million users, 100% of which work in software engineering, web development, advertising, or related careers. Should be interesting to watch it shift (or not) now that Google+ is open to the public.
Buzz words come and go faster than bad news, another year went by and now it’s all about Apple iCloud, Google+, mobile payments, cloud computing, NFC, IPTV - everything is moving so fast, it’s exciting, we want to be part of it all - but how to prioritize? what’s sustainable? which ones are trends and which ones are fads? what are the true drivers behind these experiences that will really impact behavior and habits?
In a blog post published Tuesday , Mozilla user experience designer Ian Barlow previewed the user interface their Mobile Team is in the process of building for a tablet version of Firefox.
Firefox for tablets, which does not yet have a release date, will be optimized to run on Honeycomb Android tablets. The browser will include features from the desktop version of Firefox such as tabs, themes and the Awesomebar, an adaptation of a feature launched with Firefox 3 that enables quick access to bookmarks and browsing history.
As smartphone vendors and mobile operators shift their strategies to incorporate wireless payment technologies into mobile phones, consumers will soon be able to drop their wallet and carry every piece of important payment information on their handset.
NFC is already starting to be built into a range of Android smartphones, RIM and Nokia have committed to the technology and Apple is reportedly adding the contactless technology to its new iOS devices.
Monday, 20 June. Review for The Re-Calibration of Form and Function Online
by AOL, presented by Tim Armstrong, CEO - AOL, and Arianna Huffington - Co-founder, Editor-in-Chief - The Huffington Post.
Huffington Post: Adrianna opened up, she’s extremely charismatic, funny, and overall a great entertainer. Overall she provided a lot more entertainment than good content, but that’s part being up there.
Her big idea: values online should mimic values offline. She gave a brief history of the Internet and claimed it has been very immature, and asked what shou
ld the Internet be when it grows up? All online brand experiences should focus on 4 pillars:
1. Trust: brands need trust 2. Authenticity: is like pornography - you know it when you see it 3. Engagement: around their values, not their products 4. Pursuit of happiness
…. that was it - very enlightening! :)
AOL: Then Tim took the stage, here comes the good part. Tim shows state of the art research and studies performed on aol.com using eye tracking to fully understand behavior, attention, reactions to visual stimulus, and A/B testing performed by changing key content units on the page. The result, staggering, Tim concludes that the future of the Internet and effective monetization models will consist of migrating from old fashion traditional banners to new improved bigger banners. Yes! By changing the format, adding more richness, better experience, more video, and making it longer, you can effectively increase the noise to effectively disrupt the attention of the web users and make him look at the ad. That Tim described as Ads with human emotion.
Then to try to make this statement a little more appealing, the rephrases it as brands will simply rent 20% of AOL’s portal space, so it’s not technically a banner anymore, it’s a space where they can embed rich content. Much better, phew, I thought the future of the Internet are better banners.
Ok, now finally for some real business value. Studies show that 83% of consumers use fewer than 30 sites a month; they use 20 fixed brands, and 10 rotating brands. I found this insight quite useful, makes you rethink the entire SEO and long-tail strategy. So that’s AOL’s strategy? Let’s acquire all the top brands to make sure we’re always part of the top 20.
Finally some words of wisdom: give creativity a space in the web and stop taking orders from the silicon valley.
Such statement was intended to please a creative audience, but I totally disagree. There is much to learn from the silicon valley, and the future of experiences is a marriage of brands, creativity, and entrepreneurship.
Monday, 20 June. Review for Beyond the Horizon
by PHD, presented by Mark Holden , Global Strategy and Planning Director.
Intro:
The session was consistent with the overall 2011 theme of marketing technology - the role of technology impact in advertising, marketing, and customer experience. Mark did a great job describing a bunch of new tech and putting them in perspective of why they matter for the new consumer.
He opened up stating that there are 1.2 billion people in social networks - no surprise, but the next 1 billion will enter through mobile. We all knew how important mobile is, this is just a reassurance.
Next he explained that what drives technology is us, individuals, humanity. Technology is a human invention to solve human problems, being driven strictly by human needs. Therefore, technology is a consequence of human needs and desires - and what is driving humans? What drives humanity is need for abundance: we want everything, everyone, everywhere - and we won’t stop until we get it.
Following the intro, Mark jumped into multiple categories of technical innovations, grouped by infrastructure, interface, and internet.
After my World After Advertising keynote
, I had a great interview by Horizon which came out in a print edition
back in March 2011. I took me some time to get in translated, but it was totally worth the wait – they did a great job capturing SapientNitro’s thinking on marketing, media, and technology.
SapientNitro mastermind Rob Gonda talks about marketing in the digital age and the declining importance of mass media By Santiago Campillo-Lundbeck
At the World After Advertising conference in Düsseldorf, Rob Gonda tried to shock the public by saying that traditional advertising is dead. In an interview, though, Gonda, who is SapientNitro’s Global Head of Creative Technology, gave us a more complex picture of the communication revolution sparked off by the internet and how marketing has to respond.
Horizon: Your job is to find opportunities worldwide for SapientNitro to creatively use technology in marketing. Why has technology become a strategic issue in digital marketing all of a sudden?
RG: People’s relationship with technology is the critical issue. Technology changes our habits and so it’s only logical that technology also changes the way we see brands. Technology puts new filters between customers and brands.
Google Inc. is preparing as early as Tuesday to unveil a new online music service similar to a service recently launched by Amazon.com Inc., according to people familiar with the matter, a move that escalates the battle to create the next generation of Internet businesses for storing and listening to music.
Google, like Amazon, hasn’t secured licenses from the four major recorded-music companies, according to these people, and is likely to include a system that functions much like a remote hard drive.
LinkedIn has been recommending me people I might know such as Wizard of In, Sherlock Holmes, Robin Hood, the Hatter, J. R. R. Tolkien, Albert Einstein, and others … anyone else noticed LinkedIn went totally ballistic? See enlarged image for yourself, can’t believed I actually felt for their April fool’s joke after posting mine.
Apparently Rovio Mobile, the makers of Angry Birds, did not think the success of the most sold puzzle game Angry Birds was big enough. After they already sold more than 2 million Angry Birds plush toys , Rovio plans to expand the Angry Birds brand into other types of merchandise, television shows and now even a movie. Rooster Teeth created this movie trailer which has been watched more than 3 million times in only 3 days!
Landscape photographer Terje Sorgjerd spent four years looking to create a timelapse of the aurora borealis – also known as the northern lights –, then finally flew to north Norway and spent a week capturing one of the biggest displays in recent years. The final result is absolutely amazing!
The stills were shot with a Canon 5D Mark II along with the Canon 24mm 1.4, Canon 16-35mm 2.8, and Sigma 12-24mm lenses.
The Digital Buzz blog posted today a new campaign by M&M called M&M’s Internet Invasion Game . The game was “developed” by BBDO Denmark , and there are tons of learnings we could get out of this.
1. The M&M’s Space Heroes is actually a straight up copy of the Kick Ass bookmarklet by Erik Andersson, also covered by Wired among other respectable publications. BBDO’s code acknowledges it was inspired by it, though it’s just a copy with new graphics.
I was asked to give the opening keynote at The World After Advertising
conference in Düsseldorf, Germany, back in November 2010; where I presented a PoV on the future of advertising and the digital landscape - focusing heavily on user experience driven by data & technology.
The keynote covers relations between people and brands, the evolution of the digital consumer, the evolution of technology and how it changed us, an introduction to contextual computing, adaptive experiences, the Internet of Things, and a few predictions for the next 5 years.
The events was recorded, but I have not managed to get the official video – luckily for us, someone at the front row recorded the entire keynote from their phone.
Find below the full video recording, slides, and an amazing infographic an artist made live while listening to my keynote.
Ever heard of diminished reality? It’s much like the augmented reality, except instead of using computers to add visuals, it’s about taking things out in real time.
That easy enough with a still image, perhaps, but not so simple with video… Technical University of Ilmenau’s figured it out, just draw a circle around the object you want to disappear and it practically disappears as the image synthesizer reduces the quality of the image drastically, removes your target and re-enhances in just 40 milliseconds per frame, using object tracking algorithms and guesswork to maintain the illusion as a camera moves around in 3D space. The framework’s presently running on Windows, but the team says they have plans to port it to Android soon.
Another great one for our Viral Video Mondays: A decidedly tech-flavored parody of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” featuring iPads, iPhones and Twitter.
Straight from the twisted minds of the Pantless Knights
— the same guys who brought you “New Dork” and “I’m on a Mac” — comes “Tweet It,” a reimagining of “Beat It” that pits iPads versus iPhones.
It’s amazing how brands love to use someone else’s big splash and ride it for their own … after the amazing success of the Old Spice campaign
, many brands chose to follow the same spot archetype – which should have been somehow trademarked –. Sesame Street launched their Smell Like A Monster. With over 5 million views, this cute spot quickly went viral.
Panda, an Egyptian manufacturer of cheese and dairy products, has dramatically revamped its advertising 4 months ago thanks to boutique agency Elephant Cairo . The agency sold the client the ‘crazy idea’ that if you don’t like Panda products, eat Panda products or refuse a Panda sandwich, the Panda will kick your ass. The campaign is called “Never Say No to Panda”.
Strangely the official hits on the Youtube channel don’t even come close to the 4 million hits the recently made compilation got.
After the success of the Gymkhana Practice video
with over 20 million combined views, then enhanced into an amazing viral Part II
with another 20 million + views, and now Part III – launched only 3 days ago and with over 5 million views already.
Shot just south of Paris, France in Linas at l’Autodrome de Linas –Montlhéry, this 1.58 mile oval track, built in 1924, features banks as steep as 51 degrees, which is more than double the standard incline of most NASCAR ovals.
The stunts are just amazing, a must see for any racing fan, and pretty much all men.
A recent YouTube video ad for ink correction fluid brand Tipp-Ex allows offers a custom, interactive experience to viewers based on the product’s key functionality – allowing you to correct your original intention, or to change your mind. The video’s co-protagonist – a hunter/camper – is about to shoot a bear at his campsite, when he instead decides to use Tipp-Ex (taking it from the ad unit next to video) to correct the word ’shoots’ in the video title bar, and instead allow you to instruct what the hunter should do to the bear.
It’s basically Subservient Chicken all over again – well, a lot more basic, but same idea – but with a YouTube spin. It has more than 50 different endings: dances with, sings with, talks to, hugs, draws, fights, doesn’t shoot, is shot by, loves, kisses, fucks, pisses with, sleeps with, eats, watches TV with, swims with, plays with, shakes hand with, buys, takes a photo of, fishes with, drinks with, rides, plays football with, spanks, farts, is cooked by, breakdances with, cuts, does nothing with, high fives, smokes with, moonwalks with, washes, jumps with, tickles, shows his ass to, seduces.
If you work on a large corporation, you know about time cards, expense reports, and other horribly tedious business overhead that takes so much of your time. I don’t know I’ve never put 1+1 together … As a long time technologist, I’ve used multiple automation tools such as selenium, or the selenium Firefox plugin to fill out forms and automate testing … I ran into a new browser earlier this week called Fake
- as for Fake interactions with the web.
Fake is a new browser for Mac OS X that makes web automation simple. Fake allows you to drag discrete browser Actions into a graphical Workflow that can be run again and again without human interaction. The Fake Workflows you create can be saved, reopened, and shared.
Inspired by Apple’s Automator application, Fake looks like a combination of Safari and Automator that allows you to run (and re-run) “fake” interactions with the web.
While Google Instant isn’t necessarily the exact definition of instant, it’s definitely a whole lot faster. Overall it saved 17 seconds over all ten searches combined. That’s only 1.7 seconds per search on average, but let’s say you perform 40 searches per day—that’s 24,820 seconds, 413.67 minutes, and nearly 7 hours per year. Not bad.
At its Open Innovation Experiment, Swedish software technology and design company TAT (The Astonishing Tribe) released a spectacular video showing a glimpse of possible screen technology of the future. They predict that we will have malleable screens, screens that are built into mirrors connected with Wi-Fi, e-ink touch screens and several others that can only be imagined at the moment.
Take a look at their video to see this inspired view of what comes next:
Google announced
and released instant search today, a feature that combines instant dynamic results with predictions to instantly populate the page with results as you type.
Dynamic Results - Google dynamically displays relevant search results as you type so you can quickly interact and click through to the web content you need.
Predictions - One of the key technologies in Google Instant is that we predict the rest of your query (in light gray text) before you finish typing. See what you need? Stop typing, look down and find what you’re looking for.
Scroll to search - Scroll through predictions and see results instantly for each as you arrow down.
Here’s a video that explains Google Instant in greater depth:
Perhaps one of the best features of Facebook Places was not released with the initial launch … Looking back at the Facebook Places official video , the most compelling selling point is that Facebook helps you digitalize your memories. The fact that you can geo-tag and timestamp photos, videos, and comments, allows you to live back any memories, knowing what you saw, how you felt, who you were with …
Current predictions:
Apple will launch a new iOS based device priced at $99 The iTV will only have 16Gb of Flash based storage It will mainly stream content from a local computer or the cloud It’s only capable of 720p as opposed to 1080p Apple is negotiating 99 cents rentals, down from $1.99 to $2.99, or even higher for HD. This will also apply for iPhone, iTouch, and iPad content consumption.
The week’s viral video friday goes to Gillette. Released this Monday, has quickly ramped up to 3.3 million views and 100,000 facebook shares. As part of an ad campaign for Gillette, in what was designed to look like an unscripted moment, Roger Federer serves a tennis ball across a room and it knocks a bottle off the top of a film crew member’s head. Then Federer repeats the trick. Most comments in the Youtube channel argue whether it’s true or fake … no one said anything about Gillette, nor the video really ties into the brand on any way …
Check out the official teaser video for Facebook places. What I really love about it is that it maps exactly to SapientNitro’s PoV on the space-time continuum for experience mapping; in layman terms what we believe is that every moment should cross space and time. A moment crosses spacewhen multiple people in different locations can live the same moment .. for example, you share a live video feed, lifecast, share status updates, photos, and your friends all over the world can interact with this content in real time.
Earlier today Facebook finally announced the official launch of Facebook places. Mashable
, ReadWriteWeb
, and others covered it live, but if you missed the announcement, here’s what you have to know.
Anyways, starting today, you can immediately tell people about that favorite spot with Facebook Places. You can share where you are and the friends you’re with in real time from your mobile device.
Checking In with Friends
Ever gone to a show, only to find out afterward that your friends were there too? With Places, you can discover moments when you and your friends are at the same place at the same time.
You have the option to share your location by “checking in” to that place and letting friends know where you are. You can easily see if any of your friends have also chosen to check in nearby.
To get started, you’ll need the most recent version of the Facebook application for iPhone. You also can access Places from touch.facebook.com if your mobile browser supports HTML 5 and geolocation.
Go to Places on the iPhone application or touch.facebook.com site and then tap the “Check In” button. You’ll see a list of places near you. Choose the place that matches where you are. If it’s not on the list, search for it or add it. After checking in, your check-in will create a story in your friends’ News Feeds and show up in the Recent Activity section on the page for that place.
Places is only available in the United States right now. But we expect to make it available to more countries and on additional mobile platforms soon.
This is a smart move on Coke’s end. Everyone knows that Coke mainly targets teens, and what if instead of marketing to teens, you get teens come to you, promote you, share, chat, and advocate your brand? Dream came true …
Coke organized this experimental amazing hangout villa they called The Coca Cola Village. They’ve been doing it for a few years, or at least I found videos from 2008 and 2009.
It always amazed me how SXSW
calls for speakers about 11 months in advanced and has to lock down all sessions 6 months in advanced. Of course there could be some timeless sessions that will always make sense, but it’s hard to know how topics will be relevant 9 months from now … With that said, SapientNitro
submitted 19 visionary topics
that I think will make great sessions; some returning speakers (including Freddie and myself) and some great new speakers.
It’s great to see so much variety of expertise: creative, strategic, business, technology … from SapientNitro, Government Services, Financial Services, and from so many different people like our CCO, Business Lead, Creative Directors, Technology Directors, developers, and even recruiting. Tells a lot about the diversity, multifariousness, mixture of SapientNitro
’s capabilities and expertise.
Please read below and provide feedback or questions on these topics … what else would you like to see us cover? If you like a topic please take the time to follow the link and vote for it to make sure we have the opportunity to share it with you.
Technology has liberated the dialog between brands and customers, sating consumers’ love of sharing, connecting, raving, venting… But in many ways, it’s also driven isolation as we press “skip intro” to proceed to our desired action. In this discussion, Gaston Legorburu, SapientNitro’s worldwide chief creative officer, will explore the unique paradox that technology has introduced to the consumer/brand relationship. From isolation to sharing, technology is driving a massive social revolution. Learn the art of combining design and engineering to create relevant experiences, experiences that transform barely personable brands into “builders of moments.”
Defined as using large mashup of data services to enable amazing experiences through mobile devices. What’s not digital nowadays?! Mobile is replacing the pc and becoming that unique personal technology gadget that no one lives without – and with it, comes connectivity, content, productivity, and entertainment. The magic is that mobile links the gap between digital and real world, extending experiences, and more importantly, making is easy, simple, and intuitive. Foursquare and Gowalla gaining momentum, Twitter added Places, Facebook launched their location based service and integrate with the Open Graph, Google “Me” relies on Latitude, location-location-location. But checking-in requires too much effort… Location will evolve from a reactive engagement to a proactive engagement … background services will be always-location aware. Apps will automatically react to actual location, history, friends, places, and a new set of data source mashups such as weather, humidity, light sensitivity, noise ambiance, and more. If you want to get inspired by innovations galore, this is a session you can’t miss.
The world is evolving at an amazing pace and if companies want to keep up they need to evolve too; but evolution is not a simple concept; what are the right choices? where should you invest? what do your customers want, and what are your competitors doing about it? The best VC firms in the world cannot predict the future, but a good understanding for trends, culture and behavioral shifts, technology advancements, brand evolution, micro and macro economics, and having insights on R&D and new product launches. The best brands in the world excel in designing amazing experiences. Loyalty driven through rewards, direct response advertising, and frequency / reach is a concept of the past. Loyalty is a consequence of providing great experiences across any touchpoint with the brand. What if you had a crystal ball that hint you on upcoming trends that will drive and set customer expectations? Good news, we found it!
Twitter just launched their official Tweet this button – about time … it comes in three versions (110×20, 55×20, 55×63) with five different settings for customization. You can set the URL obviously, the Tweet text default, via @SapientNitro or some user, related, and count box position.
You can embed with an iframe or embed with a JavaScript hosted at Twitter that will style a pre-determined class in a link. Pretty straight forward of course; how much can there really be for a simple Tweet this button.
You can see it server directly from Twitter here
.
Microsoft has the same ability to display street view from person PoV filmed with 360 degree cameras, just like what we use with Google Street View every day … but they built this project to dynamically mash the photos to build an infinite panorama perspective …
Today’s Viral Video Friday goes to Geico. Their new Piggy commercial is the first Geico commercial in their channel to ever go viral… amazingly, out of the 43 commercials posts in their channel, this Piggy one is the first to pass the 1 million views mark, and it did it in less than a week.
The “Art Class” spot for Foot Locker by SapientNitro features a purportedly nude male model, being described by students as “leathery” and “crooked.” Very nicely done.
Second spot takes a spin on the old butterface and introduces the concept of buttershoes.
• Old Spice accounted for 75 percent of conversations in the category in the first three months of 2010.
• Half the conversations came from women.
• The YouTube/Twitter social media response campaign was “the fastest-growing and most popular interactive campaign in history.”
• More people watched its videos in 24 hours than those who watched Obama’s presidential victory speech. (Which most of us can agree is kinda sad.)
Last month I wrote why Apple doesn’t allow Adobe near the iPhone
. Today, Adobe is trying to get into the iPad … Adobe will roll out new publishing software for tablets. This new software, which will soon take its place in the Creative Suite pantheon, will be downloadable from Adobe Labs and will include tools that bridge the gap between print-oriented InDesign and software for interactive formats.
Adobe released a video showcasing the new capabilities, available to watch at Adobe TV and embedded below. You will noticed they added tons of capabilities around content … such switching images, embedding video and rich content … but it’s all about content? What about gesture navigation? what about the experience? For how long will Adobe keep missing the experience aspect that makes Apple, Apple.
The new magazine experience in a tablet is not based on technical capabilities of the tablet, it’s all about providing a richer experience to the user… making it more natural, seamless, human per-se.
I am so glad I [accidentally] decided to write about the Old Spice videos last Friday
, prior to the social media campaign launch. The Old Spice simple and clever social media campaign has been running for the past 48 hours, allowing fans, influencers, and random people get their own personalized Old Spice video response by Tweeting, through Facebook, or Youtube commects … amazing! Full review by Mashable
is pretty good.
Inevitably and as expected, the videos got views, but following rapidly increased across all channels.
So W+K has been having fun with Old Spice lately … It’s actually quite impressive to see how every video they produce for Old Spice gets anywhere from 1 to 12 million views …
The latest one, called Old Spice | Questions got 3 million views in less than 1 week.
Today’s award goes to iPhone4 vs HTC Evo. I’m sure most of you have seen it, but if you haven’t, the video is a parody mocking Apple-heads / fans that blindly follow the brand for status … It shows how Apple builds following through designing great experiences and even if other brands have better technology, they cannot match the feeling one gets when holding an iPhone.
This video came out the same day the iPhone4 was released, immediately rocked the charts, and keep going strong.
The creator of the video worked at Best Buy, who immediately suspended him – creating some negative PR which shows you that even though Twelp won the Grand Prix at Cannes this year, Best Buy is still learning how to best leverage social media.
iAd is a mobile advertising platform developed by Apple Inc. for its iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad line of mobile devices allowing third-party developers to directly embed advertisements into their applications. Unlike other banners that open a new browser window, the iAd is a full native app. The Nissan Leaf iAd allows you to customize your car, learn about key features – including comparative miles per dollar- via an engaging, informative interface.
Freddie sent this email internally, but no reason we shouldn’t share.
The following are a collection of the work that left the biggest impression at Cannes Lions 2010, but I encourage you to visit http://www.canneslions.com/work
for the full list. The first couple below are truly amazing and should wet your appetite to view the whole list.
Prequel: I noticed that some pages were taking too long to load … I heard good things about WP Super Cache and I had tried it before, but it was messing up when toggling between web view and mobile view … randomly providing web users the mobile view, and mobile users the web view … I decided to give it another chance, tested, and it works … speeded up the site drastically.
Chapter 1: A week goes by and I notice a drop in site traffic … I analyze why and it’s mainly organic traffic from Google
More specifically, % Change -42.81% … ok, now I’m pissed… why all the sudden my search ranking dropped so much?!
Buy Meridia Pill? Reliable Online Drugstore? WTF?! Where did this come from? I obviously never put that there … So I click through and it’s my regular content … but if I open the cached Google version, this is what I see:
Citing a “very credible source,” Digg founder Kevin Rose tweeted that Google is readying “Google Me,” a social network intended to compete with Facebook … The Tweet was now deleted, but not before many sites including Gizmodo , and Louis Gray already wrote about it.
TechCrunch confirmed today that it’s not a rumor, it’s real.
D’Angelo, who was Facebook’s CTO for years, shared his thoughts as an answer to one of the questions on Quora.
Sony comes out with a new spin to 3d projection, now in Madrid. Instead of going all fancy with braking and shattering buildings, they went with a simple elegant experiences that is cool not only because it’s about 3d soccer experience just in time for the world cup, not only because it’s the first one with real 3d illustrations, but also because they make use of the building’s doors and windows to make it seem more real … it seems like the building is part of it, not just a massive projection area.
I’ve always been wondered by how brands are not just using anything as media, like plazas, buildings, the sky … but it’s actually happening … within the past month, first Samsung and then BMW using 3d projection mapping to display a full HD3D display on top of buildings. I don’t know the laws and regulations for it, but I’m sure there are some, otherwise we would see add projected on every building - ad saturation.
Samsung introduced 3d projections in Amsterdam to promote their new to-be-launched 3d tv’s. I would love to get one for the world cup, but I could only hope.
Latest news, Adobe finally gets into the iPhone/iPad by delivering Flash-based ads to the iAd network.
Mashable reads: “Adobe to Bring Flash-Based Ads to iPhone : Adobe has partnered with ad company Greystripe to deliver Flash-based ads to Apple’s iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. Greystripe makes this possible by converting Flash ads (which the devices do not currently support) into the competing HTML5 format”
Now, has Adobe stopped for a second to think, if you can do everything Flash can do in html5, why using Flash at all?
Apple has created an HTML5 Showcase
that presents its vision for the next generation of the web. Interesting combination of video, audio, typography, transitions, filters, and 360 spins. It works perfectly on my Mac using Snow Leopard and Safari, and works on my iPhone, and my iPad … however, when I wanted to try it on my Google Chrome, which is actually even better suited for html5, I found that Apple blocks it.
Great presentation / stats / numbers of the current state, size, and uses of the Internet.
The main stats were:
Email usage will shrink :: 247 billion emails sent per day, 200 are spam + growing trend of using social networks to communicate Women are social :: 84% social sites with more women than men 27MM tweets per day - has nothing on Facebook statuses Facebook has 260 Billion page views per month vs MySpace at 24 Billion Flickr hosts 4 Billion photos - Facebook gets 2.
I found this great post on innovation by Carol Rozwell – a Gartner analyst I am meeting – while I was reading her recent work… and since I will be posting a lot on the topic of innovation, thought it would be great to share this.
Innovation Proverbs by Joyce Wycoff
PEOPLE do innovation. Innovation means doing something that hasn’t been done before. By definition there is risk involved. No risk; no innovation.
There’s no question that TV & Social Web are closed together, just like pretty much everything social. From xbox live joint movie watching, to Google TV, and now Comcast’s Tunerfish.
Comcast’s Plaxo acquisition has borne fruit beyond its social media address book roots with Tunerfish, aimed at pulling social networking features and TV into one website. Currently in closed alpha, it lets TV watchers note what they’re watching and share with others, Foursquare style… so you check-in a show, check how many people have checked in, and keep an eye on what’s trending amongst the larger pool of viewers or just your friends. Of course there’s Facebook and Twitter integration, and an iPhone app will be available when the beta launches in the next few weeks.
The mobile phone is a personal computing device – totally intimate to the user, which makes it perfect to run an OS from a company that makes all their money selling advertising. Google, nether shy or laid back, gave a preview or their Android 3.0 OS that will bundle versions of visual voice mail, maps, and a totally revolutionary voice add-on that will mine conversations in real time and provide amazing unintrusive personalized recommendations.
I presented “Real-Time Everything - the Era of Communication Ubiquity” at SXSWi 2010 last week and wanted to share my deck … I uploaded it to slideshare, not sure why I haven’t uploaded all my decks there, but will slowly start doing so.
The abstract / summary described the session as: A focus universe research strategy; imagine using the entire internet as your focus group. Analyze every conversation, visualize trends, compare brands, learn insights, envisage it over time, and get real factual answers, not just amplified assumptions based on focus and control groups.
I spoke to Omar L. Gallaga from austin360 blog right before my SXSW panel
about emerging trends, including mobile, augmented reality, and social media, and he posted this interview on their blog; wanted to share a few PoV’s that I provided …
American-Statesman: As smartphones have gotten more popular, we’ve been hearing more and more about augmented reality. Can you explain to us what it actually is and how it’s being used?
Augmented Reality (AR) is the ability of combining digital and real-world aspects to provide a greater or enhanced experience. Traditionally, it’s layering a digital overlay on top of a video stream, think NFL first-down marker, or NASCAR car information. It is not new, but due to the recent penetration of web and mobile it has been getting greater buzz. It was originally coined in 1992, used in PCs in 1999, by Sony PS3 in 2007, but it wasn’t until 2009 when adopted by Flash and made available for the masses that it began to gain momentum.
NFL and NASCAR are basic examples of mainstream media using AR, but the true reach is when it’s more personal: enhance computer or phone video streams with digital layers triggered by either some market or symbol in the video, or GPS and compass information, or any data source that can be translated into personalized visualization that adds and provides value to the user. Traditional uses range from recognizing trading cards, to real-size mailing boxes, to visualizing how would your new TV look in your living room.
As smartphones have gotten more popular, mobile augmented reality still has not, but they’re setting the base bricks and platform to allow greater penetration in the future. Location awareness, compass, maps, user generated content, all contribute to greater and richer data sources that will allow for great digital and real world mashups. The best mobile apps right now are TwittARound, Layar, Nearest Tube, TAT Augmented ID, SREngine, and Wikitude AR Travel Guide.
Thank you Gigaom So I’m an iPhone user, and so are most of my friends … but I really think the new gold mine is Android; I was playing with the HTC Hero and Samsung Moment today, Droid Eric over the weekend, and can’t wait to get my hands on a Nexus One … With 50 new Android phones coming out this year, an open app eco-system, and 4G coming out this year, I really can’t wait to see the outcome …
**What does it take to make a successful iPhone application? **
Before answering what does it take to make a successful iPhone application we have to define what makes an application successful. Sapient always asks why are we building something, what are we trying to achieve, and how are we going to measure it; so starting from top down, what are the business objectives, the key performance indicators, and all metrics. iPhone applications usually serve one of two purposes: drive brand or drive revenue.
**Objective: Drive brand
**Applications that drive brand most likely are free since they have to target a broad reach. Objective is usually increase awareness, brand recall, or word of mouth, and is traditionally measured based on simple downloads, usage, and extended with how many share with friends, stickiness, and engagement levels. A good way to take it one step further is tie in social media monitoring and analyze share and velocity of voice, general sentiment, and overall impact of the application within social conversations.
Now that we understand how to measure it, what will the application do? Nowadays brands cannot push messages to the consumers, they have to provide value and we generally call it brand as an enabler. Applications that drive brand usually fall under one of two categories: be entertaining or be useful. Entertaining applications usually have a wider adoption, more downloads, but less engagement as users open it just a few times before they get bored. Useful applications have a smaller reach but higher engagement; less users will download the application, but they will use it much more than simple entertainment applications. However the key for both types is simplicity.
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A few days ago I found this shocking blog claiming “Live Twitter News Billboard Leads to Social Media Fail ”… go ahead, read it and see if you agree.
First, the fact that they pulled off a digital billboard with live tweets is awesome.
So now ask yourself, what was the cause of this event? live tweets? twitter? social media?
I had the pleasure to moderate a panel for Omma mobile in October with a nice talented group of experts:
Panelist | Jeannette Kocsis, SVP Digital Marketing, Harte-Hanks, Inc. Jeannette_Kocsis@harte-hanks.com Panelist | Ujjal Kohli, CEO, Rhythm Media lisa@rhythmnewmedia.com Panelist | Kyle Outlaw, UX lead, Razorfish kyle.outlaw@razorfish.com Panelist | Ken Willner, CEO of Zumobi ken.willner@zumobi.com Panelist | Jamie Wells, Director, Global Trade Marketing, Microsoft Mobile Advertising jawells@microsoft.com Moderator | Rob Gonda, Director of Digital Strategy & Innovation, Sapient rgonda@sapient.
After playing with Chrome developer edition for the Mac for a few weeks, Google released today the official Beta . I tried it on a PC a few months ago and quite honestly, was not impressed at all, and haven’t paid much attention since. Today I decided to run a few tests, and it seems to be 1) pretty fast, and 2) extensible?
Open http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/canopy/ and click launch experiment … tried it with Firefox 3.
Finally, AT&T’s long-awaited MMS update for the iPhone is finally ready. Just plug your iPhone into iTunes and hit the “Check for Update” button.
You should get the dialog message above, saying: “An update to your carrier settings for your iPhone is available. Would you like to download it now?”
Hit “Download and Update” and wait a few seconds, then go to your iPhone and launch the Messages app. There should be a little camera icon to the left of the text input box at the bottom.
Infrastructure software giant Autonomy launched a new web content management tool under its Interwoven brand, designed to monitor social media content and allow businesses to act on the insights gleaned.
The Autonomy Interwoven Social Media Analysis solution is a combination of the Autonomy Interwoven web content management system and Autonomy IDOL (Intelligent Data Operating Layer). It is designed to provide organizations with the ability to understand and leverage the conversations happening in social networks to make some money.
Twitter Search is going to get a lot more interesting soon, said Twitter’s new vice president of operations, Santosh Jayaram, who until recently was VP of Search Quality for Google. Jayaram confirmed that Twitter Search, which currently searches only the text of Twitter posts, will soon begin to crawl the links included in tweets and begin to index the content of those pages.
This will make Twitter Search a much more complete index of what’s happening in real time on the Web and make it an even more credible competitor to Google Search for people looking for very timely content.
The seemingly endless media and industry fawning over Twitter has lead to the widespread debate over the merits of real-time search and the future of the search industry. Yes, Twitter is an amazing service that allows people to share their thoughts, however poignant, painful or pointless, on events as they happen. However, the hype is reaching a fever pitch only exacerbated by Google acquisition rumors. With that in mind, it’s time to try and figure out exactly where this wonderful new medium belongs in the world of search.
It has been suggested that Google is looking to acquire Twitter because it views it as a threat. That line of thinking is completely insane because Google isn’t going anywhere. The company is still the top dog in terms of financial stability, commitment to innovation and business strategy. Depending on what research firm you ask, Google owns roughly 80 percent of the search engine market and is still gobbling up market share. In terms of users, Twitter doesn’t even match Facebook’s potential as a rival. Twitter is simply not a threat to Google; in fact, the search giant could simply consume the Twitter API. The good news is that it probably won’t because Twitter is a piece of the greater problem Google is looking to solve.
Facebook has opened up its activity stream through a new API for developers. Now any developer can create new applications incorporating the real-time stream. One of the first apps to take advantage of this new API is Seesmic Desktop , A Twitter client which is now adding your Facebook feed through this API (something Tweetdeck already did in the past through other more restrictive means). Facebook has also created its own desktop notification client to demonstrate what can be built with the API.
Last month, Jason Calacanis wrote he’d pay $250,000 to be listed as a Twitter “Suggested Follow ” for two years. Getting on Twitter’s “suggested” list can drive hundred of thousands of people to follow a Twitter feed.
Facebook has taken notice, and this weekend has started recommending Facebook fan pages of some public personas and brand on its own site. (Sarah Lacy, Julia Allison, and Mark Cuban have all already made Facebook’s list.
As Twitter’s growth explodes, speculation has intensified about whether the service can be profitable. Twitter’s online traffic, excluding cellphones, surged to nearly 9.8 million unique visitors in February from 6.1 million in January, according to comScore.
In pursuit of revenue, Twitter faces the same challenge that has dogged social-networking platforms like Facebook. If advertisers can tap into its network free of charge, why would they pay the company to do so?
Part 1 / 2 of free social media monitoring and measuring tools list: list of tools to be used in techniques described on Part 2 / 2 - Free Social Media Monitoring Techniques
– interactive marketing blog special.
HowSociable?
- A simple, free, tool that can measure the visibility of your brand on the web across 22 metrics
Addict-o-matic
- A nice search engine that aggregates rss feeds, allowing you to quickly see the areas where a brand is lacking in presence
socialmention
- A social media search engine offering searches across individual platforms (eg blogs, microblogs) or all, together with a ‘social rank’ score. Whether or not the score is transparent enough to be meaningful is open to debate.
Blog Search Tools
TECHNORATI Search
- Technorati’s new search interface. Use it to find top blogs based upon inbound links only.
TECHNORATI Advanced
- Technorati’s advanced search page allows you to search for blogs (rather than posts) based on tags.
Google Blog Search
- Google’s index of blog posts. The advanced search tab allows you to search based on additional criteria. Very good for searching between specific dates.
IceRocket
- Blog search tool that also graph-ifies!
BlogPulse
- Search for blog posts by keyword. Developed by Nielsen BuzzMetrics.
Part 2 / 2 of free social media monitoring and measurement: techniques to be used with tools on this page or any tool on Part 1 / 2 - Free Social Media Monitoring Tools
– interactive marketing blog special.
We’ve previously posted why social media analysis tools are important
, and ever since I’ve been trying a bunch on them and our shortlist includes Visible Technologies, Techrigy SM2, Converseon, and Collective Intellect on the high end, and trackur and BrandsEye on the mid/low end .. I will post a nice comparisson later this week.
However, those are very expensive tools for personal use and small businesses, so what I usually do as a free easy to use solution is set up a bunch of free services and aggregate them using Google Reader.
Yahoo introduced several tools that it says will help marketers target their ads more efficiently at a time when many of them are cutting advertising spending drastically.
Search Retargeting for Display Ads – lets advertisers target display advertising based on a user’s search activity. So a user that searches on a term like “sandals” could be served a display ad for footwear elsewhere on Yahoo’s network.
Enhanced Retargeting for Display Ads – allows advertisers to deliver dynamically generated display ads across the Yahoo network based on user activity on an advertiser’s site. Going beyond standard site retargeting, the new technology would allow an advertiser to target users who visit an airline website to check offers for flights from SFO-JFK, and serve them a personalized offer for that specific flight when they visit a page within the Yahoo Network.
Enhanced Targeting for Search Ads – adds capabilities for Sponsored Search and Content Match ads, including ad scheduling and demographic targeting within search. New features are designed to extend the advertiser’s control over where and when an ad is shown at both the campaign and ad group level, including what time of day and day of the week an advertiser would like campaigns to run (ad scheduling), and what age and gender they’d like to reach (demographic). Advertisers will be able to vary their bids for different segments in order to increase their ability to reach the desired audience.
In his Daily Show segment “Old Man Stewart Shakes His Fist At _____,” Stewart starts the segment with: “For the uninitiated, here’s how Twitter works - I have no f***cking idea.” He goes on, “I have no idea how it works - or why it is.” … Oh surpise, Viacom made YouTube take it down, but here it is for all you guys … enjoy.
[ ](http://www.comedycentral.com) [The Daily Show With Jon Stewart](http://www.
Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. Estimates of the number of daily users vary as the company does not release the number of active accounts. In November 2008, Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research estimated that Twitter had 4-5 million users. A February 2009 Compete.com blog entry ranks Twitter as the third largest social network (behind Facebook and MySpace), and puts the number of users at roughly 6 million and the number of monthly visitors at 55 million.
Find below a collection of the best tools to analyze, aggregate, and visualize twitter data. Please add a comment if you’d like us to look at additional tools.
So John Borthwick (former AOL exec) woke up bored yesterday and thought, you know what, let’s make some noise and see what happens if I predict that Twitter will kill Google
… so props to Borthwick, he’s completely off, he knows it, but it got tons of people talking about micro-blogging, real time search, social media, and the future of search … so here’s my take.
Google is not going anywhere … People have been predicting that Google will go down for years, but they’re still the best company out there, in terms of financial stability, innovation, culture, and business strategy … Google has 81.5% of search engine market share:
Adobe demoed Flash 10 runtime for mobile
back at Adobe Max 2008 on the Android
platform, the Windows mobile
and the Symbian
platform. During the keynote, I remember that Kevin Lynch mentioned that Adobe has been working on Flash for the iPhone without much Apple support …
The ongoing debate over Flash on the iPhone appears to be over after Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen announced last week at the World Economic Forum
that Adobe
and Apple
are working together in an effort to bring Flash to the iPhone.
While Narayen didn’t answer the question of whether Apple had strengthened its commitment to putting Flash on the iPhone he did point out that the ball was now in Adobe’s court. “We have the developer kit and the onus is now on us,” he said.
During the Bloomberg interview, Narayen said that Adobe plans to have over a million devices shipped by the end of the year that have Flash and he’s not just talking iPhone; the company is working on the Android
platform, the Windows mobile
and the Symbian
platform.
Msnbc.com’s brand new inauguration video player features some innovative features: beyond streaming the live event itself, it features inauguration speeches stretching back for decades. Each has a transcript in a sidebar. Click a word or a tag, and you jump instantly to that location in the video. Highlight a sentence or two, and it spits out a little code, letting you embed that exact clip on your blog. Dynamic editing, right from the player… More about the player in the Wall Street Journal .
I decided to start a new trend and post something perfect for those Friday’s EOD when you can’t wait to go home and relax… Every Friday I’ll post the latest or most watched viral videos… Fresh content for your entertainment.
Four marketers are teaming up to air two commercials in super-fabulous 3-D as part of a special “event” during this year’s Super Bowl telecast on Feb. 1 to run the first-ever all 3D Super Bowl commercial break. The ads, which will run at the end of the second quarter will mark the debut of DreamWorks Animation’s premier 3D movie trailer for its upcoming feature film, “Monsters vs. Aliens” and a 60-second spot in 3-D for PepsiCo’s SoBe Lifewater.
You got to love Latin American humor!
Some background … The Argentinan and Brazilian soccer / football / futbol rivalry is highly competitive as well as their respective sets of fans. Games between the two teams, even those that are only friendly matches, are often marked by notable and sometimes controversial incidents. Historically, it’s been pretty even (out of 93 matches there were 24 draws, Argentina won 34, and Brazil won 35, … though Argentina only has 2 World Cup titles and Brazil has 5!
The gory/comic spot for Evil Dead the Musical, by Saatchi & Saatchi in Toronto won the title of AdFreak’s Freakiest Ad of 2008, after collecting 49 percent of the votes at AdFreak… check out all the ads in alphabetical order… which one is your favorite?
Guitar virtuoso Joe Satriani has sued
Coldplay for copyright infringement over claims that their hit single, Viva La Vida, used “substantial original portions” of his song If I Could Fly from 2004, seeking damages for “any and all profits.” The lawsuit has been filed in Los Angeles federal court.
Chris Martin has said: “We’re definitely good, but I don’t think you can say we’re that original. I regard us as being incredibly good plagiarists.” I bet he wishes he hadn’t said that now…
Consumers want information everywhere and at all times: from access to their service accounts on phone IVRs, main portals, social networks, and mobile devices, to identifying music with programs such as Verizon’s V Cast Song ID, or iPhone apps such as midomi and shazam. The latest trend is to allow the consumer to easily retrieve additional information on anything they want, lately commercialized using Matrix codes, also known as two-dimensional bar codes.
The most popular matrix code is a QR Code
, created by Japanese corporation Denso-Wave in 1994. The “QR” is derived from “Quick Response”, as the creator intended the code to allow its contents to be decoded at high speed. QR Codes are common in Japan, where they are currently the most popular type of two dimensional codes.
QR Codes are used in a broad context, including both commercial tracking applications and convenience-oriented applications aimed at mobile phone users (known as mobile tagging). QR Codes storing addresses and URLs may appear in magazines, on signs, buses, business cards or just about any object that users might need information about. Users with a camera phone equipped with the correct reader software can scan the image of the QR Code causing the phone’s browser to launch and redirect to the programmed URL. This act of linking from physical world objects is known as a hardlink or physical world hyperlinks. Users can also generate and print their own QR Code for others to scan and use by visiting one of several free QR Code generating sites.
Akamai, the largest CDN with access to more information than you can imagine, announced
a new service called Advertising Decision Solutions (ADS), a new division in the company that will work with its clients to apply behavioral-targeting layers to ad campaigns; it has also acquired Acerno, a company that has built itself on the notion of “predictive modeling” for $95 million.
Akamai has access to anonymous traffic from all over the world on all type of sites, and has access to track user paths and determine behavior. For example, they can know that a user has been looking at specific cars across multiple sites and suggest a targeted ad on a totally different publisher. The best of all, is that Akamai has access to this data without requiring any integration from publishers, no pixel images, no scripts, just raw data from their content networks.
First big announcement is that there’s a new emphasis on the Flash Platform – as originally called by Macromedia in 2005. Flash, Flex, AIR, and Thermo are just tools to develop experiences using the Flash Runtime, and apparently all these names are just confusing people. Adobe decided to consolidate everything into one platform and market it accordingly. Thermo was officially renamed to Flash Catalyst, and for those of you not familiar with Thermo, it’s a new tool still on early stages of development, targeted to designers or more specifically interactive designers, and allows them to convert a PSD or AI file into a RIA with all events, motions, states, animations, and data… and the best part is that it generates mxml and as3 code so a developer can extend and continue the development using Flex Builder.
Great day at Ad:Tech today, from panels to contacts, new business opportunities, new technologies, new trends, new services… Ad:Tech has it all.
The day started with a keynote from Jonathan Klein, President of CNN/US. John said that CNN embraces innovation, new technologies, new techniques, new trends, and urges all their employees to try new ideas. They have been using user generated content to get faster stories, they have a political blog aggregator that became the largest in the country, they have a program where an expert follows twitter feeds and answers questions and concerns online, in real time, they have a talk show where the host podcasts during commercials, linking the tv air experience with online / web experience. Another twitter fact is that CNN took 4 minutes to cover a recent earthquake in LA, whereas someone tweet it in 30 seconds. They also started providing more data for the next gen during the elections, especially seen during the debates; under the assumption that the younger gen can multitask and consume multiple feeds of information concurrently, they added the analysts’ opinions and scores during debates on side panels, as well as real time undecided voters conversions. Another link between air and web is John King’s touch screen; after the success of the John playing with the screen, they uploaded an interactive version to their site allowing anyone to play with it, just like on tv.
Apple just released two new “Get a Mac” spots mocking Microsoft’s $350 million advertising investment. Although I do like the new “I’m a PC” spots and the “Windows without walls” or “Life without walls” messages, I always find the “Get a Mac” ads hilarious.
Big week for Rich Internet Applications with two big releases: Microsoft Silverlight 2 and Adobe Flash 10. Both bring in new sets of capabilities that make the Internet a better place. So anything changes with this new release? should you look into using them, adopting, which one is better? Many questions, but the answer as always is ‘it depends’. I will list all features introduced by the new versions, but an important factor as it has always been, is adoption rate or market penetration. Adobe Flash Player 9 is installed on 97.7% of all computers, and Microsoft has not yet released their percentage…. They claim that Silverlight gets 1.5MM downloads per day (def inflated), but my guess is that they don’t have over 25% penetration with Silverlight 1.0. Adobe has demonstrated their growth rate and can guaranty that Flash 10 will be at 90% penetration within a year, my best guess is that Silverlight 2 won’t even have 15%…. so choose your product wisely, Adobe may have some better features, Microsoft may have others… but if you need anyone to actually see your site, use Flash. If you ever doubt this, remember what happened with the Olympics
.
The iPhone obviously had a huge impact on the smartphone market selling over 1MM phones on its opening weekend, but on top of that it also created buzz on the smartphone market and all those people who also wanted a smartphone but not necessarily an iPhone or switching to AT&T are looking around for alternatives… Blackberry stock doubled, Verizon came out with the Voyager, and now T-Mobile with the G1. So would the G1 compete with the iPhone? Experts say that the G1 will sell 400,000 phones before the end of the year … not an impressive number, but then again, t mobile is tiny compared to AT&T. The main difference with Android and the iPhone, and that Android has all its numbers combined – all carriers, all brands, all models – and the iPhone is just one.
The Android platform is a software stack for mobile devices including an operating system, middleware and key applications. Developers can create applications for the platform using the Android SDK.
Android is Google’s attempt to dominate the mobile advertising market, just as it has dominated the online PC advertising market, said Craig Wigginton, industry leader for Deloitte’s telecommunications practice. “Their number-one driver for pushing this is the advertising model,” he said.
The G1, the first Android phone introduced by T-Mobile, Google, and HTC on Tuesday, comes loaded with Google applications, including Gmail, Gtalk, Maps, and YouTube. The home screen includes just one item: a Google search bar. Each of those applications is an opportunity for Google to deliver advertisements to users.
There are 3.5 billion mobile-phone users worldwide; many more than computers users. Google, with their success at delivering advertising to desktop computers are looking to monetize this enormous opportunity.
While most social networks struggle to sell advertising due to lack of proper segmentation and totally irrelevant content for advertisers, LinkedIn has so much demand that they decided to launch their own ad network. LinkedIn claims 27 million registered users, according to comScore, 5.2 million from the U.S. visited the site in July (8.7 million worldwide).
Microsoft’s new ads begin with company employee Sean Siller – who looks a whole lot like John Hodgman, the actor who plays the PC in Apple’s ads – saying “I’m a PC and I’ve been made into a stereotype”, directly targeting Apple. It’s an interesting strategy attacking directly Apple’s implication that Mac is cool and PC’s are boring…
There’s a fine line between crazy and genius and CPB’s new Microsoft has drawn some attention and criticism at least in the advertising community. The common consensus is that it was a disaster, but is there more to it? As nicely said by nowpublic:
The widespread consensus: Microsoft + Jerry + Bill = FAIL.
The result: Gates + Seinfeld = CANCELLED.
The Microsoft version: it was all part of the plan.
Introduction Imagine a device that scan all internet activity and throttle p2p traffic, reduce spam, protect against hacking attacks, scan against viruses, all done in real time for millions of users. Now imagine the same device can also read all your email, know what sites you visit, see every form post you submit, read every instant message you send, know about every comment you make on social networks, know about your buying habits, know about your searches, know about the videos you watch, know about the music you listen to, and imagine that this device stores all this information about build a really detailed behavioral profile on you, and partners with advertisers to target the perfect adverb specifically for you.
Sex in advertising is the use of sexual attraction as a tool of persuasion to draw interest to a particular product, for purpose of sale. Gallup & Robinson, an advertising and marketing research firm reports that in more than 50 years of testing advertising effectiveness, it has found the use of the erotic to be a significantly above-average technique in communicating with the marketplace.
The Sun, a UK newspaper decided to develop a desktop RSS reader to push their news and highlights; now that’s a boring idea. Why would you download yet another RSS reader? Maybe because this one has Keeley Hazell, a Sun page 3 model that usually involves her appearing topless or on a nice tasteful lingerie.
“This first set of ads features Bill Gates and comedian Jerry Seinfeld. Think of these ads as an icebreaker to reintroduce Microsoft to viewers in a consumer context. Later this month, as the campaign moves into its next phase, we’ll go much deeper in telling the Windows story and celebrating what it can do for consumers at work, at play and on-the-go.” explains Microsoft SVP Bill Veghte, in an internal email to all employees.
Microsoft is launching a $300 million ad campaign starting September 4th, says the WSJ
. The ad campaign will star comedian Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates, and it was developed to combat the negative image that many consumers have about Windows Vista and also to finally push back against Apple’s popular Mac vs. PC campaign. Really interesting move by CPB, which after winning Microsoft back earlier this year finally shows the big idea.
A new video featuring Jerry and Bill showed up yesterday in YouTube, and my first reaction was WTF! I’m sure CPB has something really good planned, they always do, and perhaps this is intentional, but seriously, what is this?
We previously blogged about ping.fm as the best solution for a mass status update, allowing you to micro-blog to every possible destination, and it is now open for public beta .
Ping.fm’s greatest strength is its support of many different platforms and applications. You can use it through AIM, GTalk, iGoogle, Windows Live Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, WAP, iPhone, SMS or just plain e-mail.
Google announced today
that they will release their own browser tomorrow, code named Google Chrome. Beta version will be launched tomorrow morning only, initially available only for Windows.
[update]. Google Chrome beta is now live and can be downloaded here
.
Google Chrome is open source and based on WebKit, which is the same engine used by Safari and Adobe AIR. This is really good news because just the thought of yet another browser with different JavaScript and CSS engines to test every site and web app is really unpleasant.
Mobile payment is the collection of money from a consumer via a mobile device such as their mobile phone, SmartPhone, or Personal Digital Assistant (PDA). Mobile payments can be used to purchase a good or service online, pay in a retail location, or transfer money to another person. There are many methods for mobile payments, such as premium SMS (Short Message Service), WAP (Wireless Application Protocol), and NFC (Near Field Communication). Following a few key points about these particular methods.
Social media is the use of electronic and Internet tools for the purpose of sharing and discussing information and experiences with other human beings. The term most often refers to activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio.
Social media consists of social networks (myspace, facebook, linkedin), social network aggregation (friendfeed), user generated content (youtube, flickr, wikipedia), social bookmarking (delicious, sumbleupon), social news (digg, dzone, reddit), virtual worlds (second life), online gaming (world of warcraft), livecasting (justin.
Imagine a world where advertising is so targeted that it is actually welcomed by the users. I know, most users don’t like any types of ads; it is understandable nowadays, since publishers try to squeeze ads anywhere and everywhere they can… there are multiple types of ads: disruptive (try to force the ad thru), user initiated (user has to show some interest), brand placement (brands in movies or games); and there is also the relevance of the ad… Targeted ads are important and effective for advertisers, but also more pleasant for the consumers.
I decided to create this new section where we can post the latest innovations in the advertising and technology realms and our vision and dreams for future years. Please provide feedback, as this section is definitely prominent for opinions and discussions.
Let me get it started with a few thoughts on behavioral targeted advertising .
SXSW is one of the most prestigious music, film, and interactive events. We submitted a few panels we hope you find them interesting, and if you do please support us by voting for them; it only takes a couple of minutes.
Panel 1: Emerging trends of Mobile Technology (by Rob Gonda and experts TBD)
iPhone 2.0, Android, Flash Lite 3.0, Streaming Video, Electronic Wallets, … Mobile technology is growing rapidly and becoming an intrinsic part of consumer mentality.
title: “Viral Video Friday: Mike Portnoy Sparta Remix” date: 2012-06-29 16:24:51 id: 2543 categories:
Humor Video Viral tags: Mike Portnoy Sparta Remix viral video Viral Video Friday Ok, so it’s far from a viral video but I had to share it. For those who don’t know me well, I’m a long time huge Dream Theater fan, and Mike Portnoy was their drummer since their inception in 1985 until last year. Someone made this low-tech mock of the famous Sparta Remix videos and Portnoy himself found it hilarious and shared on Facebook.
If you work on a large corporation, you know about time cards, expense reports, and other horribly tedious business overhead that takes so much of your time. I don’t know I’ve never put 1+1 together … As a long time technologist, I’ve used multiple automation tools such as selenium, or the selenium Firefox plugin to fill out forms and automate testing … I ran into a new browser earlier this week called 
Earlier today Facebook finally announced the official launch of Facebook places. 
Last month I wrote 
I am so glad I [accidentally] decided to write about the 
Freddie sent this email internally, but no reason we shouldn’t share.
Apple has created an 
Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. Estimates of the number of daily users vary as the company does not release the number of active accounts. In November 2008, Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research estimated that Twitter had 4-5 million users. A February 2009 Compete.com blog entry ranks Twitter as the third largest social network (behind Facebook and MySpace), and puts the number of users at roughly 6 million and the number of monthly visitors at 55 million.
Adobe 
